Poisoned Justice
Page 31
True to form, we’d sit down to an enormous meal of poached salmon, baked ham (or roast lamb, if the butcher at Mission Market had a good cut in the shop), mounds of colcannon (or poundies, depending on which version of potatoes went best with the meat), glazed carrots, dressed cabbage, sweet potato bake, and piles of soda bread. At some point, Tommy would spill his drink, which wouldn’t matter. After dinner, I’d share a bottle of Jameson’s finest with the guys (saving a glass for Carol and giving a bottle of Coke to Tommy) while the women did the dishes. Larry and Dennis would take turns losing to Tommy in checkers. We’d end the evening early because Tommy would fall asleep, probably with his head on Carol’s lap, and my mother would begin to nod off, having spent the entire day preparing the feast.
My mother hosted these monthly dinners because she saw us all as family. Larry, Dennis, Carol, and whoever else was connected to the business kept her and Tommy with a roof over their heads and food on the table. Killing things might seem like an ugly way to hold a family together, but the Irish know from experience that the world is not an easy or pretty place. The Old World folks on Potrero Hill understood that butchers, exterminators, soldiers, and cops kept the rest of society believing that things are clean, safe, and decent. Coming away from an evening with my mother and Tommy always reminded me of the honor in a job well done, whether it was transplanting hearts or spraying cockroaches. Both took guts because most people didn’t want the burden of what it meant when something went wrong with a scalpel or a poison.
By the time I got to the house, a cold drizzle had begun to fall and downtown San Francisco had disappeared in the mist. I poured myself a Black Bush, put on Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, and prepared some butterflies for pinning. The monarchs would need to hurry if they were going to make it to their overwintering grounds.
CHAPTER 49
By late October, the damp of winter in San Francisco had arrived. As in earlier years, I reluctantly gave up insect collecting with Tommy to spend our weekend afternoons prepping and pinning specimens while a bone-chilling fog lurked outside. But the weatherman had predicted that the weekend might provide a final gasp of Indian summer.
So I told my mother I’d pick up Tommy after church for an outing. She, in her own gently insistent way, suggested that I might join them for the Mass. I failed to come up with a plausible excuse on the fly. What’s more, I could see the hope on her face—an irrepressible belief that I was one of the lost sheep that the shepherd would bring back to the fold. When I was a rebellious teen, I’d once told her that the Church was no better than organized crime, that both rackets shook down people who they’d managed to scare. Her face fell and I could hear her sobbing as my father lifted me off my feet by my upper arm and dragged me up to my room. My bicep was black and blue for a week—it was as close as he ever came to beating me. “You want to hurt somebody,” he snarled, “then you come after me. We’ll settle it like men.” I sensed that with the anniversary of my father’s death upcoming, she needed to believe. And my being at Mass was vital to her.
The scripted ritual was as superficially elegant and personally empty as ever, although Father Griesmaier’s sermon was almost interesting. The gospel reading was about Jesus picking his apostles, which I figured was something like my hiring employees. This led me to think about the past month and take some pride in having hired Nicole (“Nick”), who was one tough piece of work and took no crap from either Larry or Dennis. She worked as hard as the guys and was earning their respect. To my delight, Nick treated customers with the sort of genuine politeness that had people like old Mrs. Morgan calling Carol to say that they didn’t think this was the sort of work that a lady should be doing but they appreciated her courtesy, “which is so lacking in young people today.”
When I drifted back to Father Griesmaier’s sermon, he was admonishing the congregants that while St. Jude is the patron saint of lost causes, nothing is hopeless in the eyes of the Lord. He insisted that “despair is the greatest sin, for it is the opposite of faith, the forsaking of God.”
I didn’t buy the whole God-can-do-anything line (if the big guy can do anything, then why make a world with so much suffering?). But the priest got me thinking about fighting against long odds. I’d gone to the Roxie to watch Rocky earlier in the week, which turned out to be a great movie. Maybe the Catholics would attract more people if they used action-packed movies with vibrant soundtracks rather than dusty old stories and hymns that nobody sings. By this time, I’d lost interest in the service and started thinking about a new organizational plan for the warehouse while alternately sitting, standing, and kneeling in concert with the congregation.
When the Mass was over, the folks filed through the double doors at the back of the sanctuary and made their way around the building to the undercroft where a lunch spread was waiting. According to some mysterious liturgical calendar, this was the Feast Day for Saints Simon and Jude, which translated into a sumptuous feed put on by the church ladies. I knew that Jude was my mother’s favorite saint, a commitment sealed when they built St. Jude Children’s Hospital in Memphis a few years after Tommy’s poisoning. She and Mrs. Flannigan organized a bingo night and silent auction every year to raise funds for the hospital.
My mother was busy chatting with her friends in the sanctuary, as they’d delivered their covered dishes to the basement before the Mass and gossip trumped hunger. It was a perfect day for her—I’d been at church, St. Jude had been celebrated, and flowers from her garden had adorned the altar. I’d learned about the flowers by eavesdropping. She’d managed to work it into a discussion of who’d brought what to the feast. Of course, there’d not been the slightest hint of boasting, but I knew that providing the flowers was a real coup in the world of church ladies.
With the initial gossip exhausted, the others headed to the undercroft. My mother lingered for a moment to admire the flowers and soak in the morning. So we were the last people to be greeted by Father Griesmaier on our way out.
“Ah, Mrs. Riley, I see you managed to find that lost lamb of yours who seems to wander off on Sundays.” He smiled slyly while pressing my mother’s hands between his.
“Yes, Father. He’s not as regular as the Lord would want, but he’s as fine a son as a mother could hope for,” she replied diplomatically.
“Indeed,” the priest continued, as if I were invisible, “he’s a good man. And as for you, I hope you saw that today’s rosary is ‘The Joyful Mysteries’—a favorite of yours, I believe.”
“I did see that, Father. Mrs. Flannigan and I will be praying the rosary this afternoon. Riley is taking Tommy to the park. Right, Tommy?” she asked, turning to my brother. He’d managed to sit quietly, probably fidgeting less than I did. Now that he was liberated from the pew, the kid nodded excitedly. Father Griesmaier gave him a vigorous hair-rubbing, which added to its usual state of disorder despite my mother’s best efforts. At least his shirt was tucked in, which was saying quite a bit for him. In fact, he seemed more able to care for himself these days.
“I’ll see you at the saints’ feast,” the priest added as my mother headed out, Tommy following with his excited, lurching gait. “And Riley, can I speak with you for a minute,” he continued as I did my best to slip out.
“Sure, Father, what is it?” The priest waited until my mother and brother were out of earshot. Then he looked around to be sure we were alone. People were milling outside, enjoying the sunlight—perhaps the last they’d see for a while—but they were clearly engaged in their own lively conversations.
“This week, it seems we are twice blessed.”
“Meaning?”
He smiled. “The parish treasurer told me that St. Teresa’s received an extremely large, anonymous donation.”
“Really?” I asked with my best impression of innocence. “How much, may I ask?”
“The gift was $150,000, and the donor’s attorney said his client instructed that the money was to support Tommy’s Fund. That will put the program on solid footin
g for a very long time.” So the life insurance company had finally settled with Laurie Odum and she’d upheld her end of the deal.
“That’s certainly good news, Father.”
“Indeed it is, my son. And might you be able to shed some light on the circumstances of this donation?”
“Why would I know anything?” I shrugged.
“Because I’m a fine judge of character. I’m a man of the cloth, but the cloth isn’t pulled over my eyes. As a priest, you get to know about people—sometimes a great deal more than they imagine.” He lowered his chin and peeked over the top of his glasses, waiting for my reply.
“Well, Father, it sounds like maybe we should just chalk it up to another one of those joyful mysteries that my mother will be praying about, eh?”
He chuckled quietly and shook his head. “Maybe so. But I suspect that the Lord is not the only one around here working in mysterious ways.”
Seeing a chance to change the subject, I asked, “You said the church was twice blessed. What else happened?”
“Riley! Surely you listened to the Notre Dame-Navy game and heard how Dave Waymer broke up the fourth-down pass in the end zone in the last minute. It was a pigskin miracle, if ever there was one.”
He put his arm around my shoulders and guided me out the door and to the undercroft, the whole time talking about whether Rick Slager could take the Fighting Irish to a national championship. Father Griesmaier had pinned his hopes on Joe Montana. But a shoulder injury had sidelined him, which was too bad because he was a Sicilian kid from the coal-mining hills of Pennsylvania—just the heritage for a tough quarterback. And this led the pudgy priest to a digression about the virtues of Joe Theismann (an Austrian boy, the priest emphasized) who’d taken Notre Dame to the Cotton Bowl in 1970. Becoming a bit uncomfortable with his effusive ethnic pride, he hastened to note that Theismann had taken over from Terry Hanratty, a proper Irish lad who had led the Notre Dame to the national championship in 1966 (giving me a hearty pat on the back, as if I had something to do with it).
It was like the who-begat-whom stuff in the Bible, except with quarterbacks in South Bend, Indiana. I suspect his jovial recounting of the lineage would’ve gone on much longer had we not reached the undercroft, where piles of kielbasas, pierogi, and pasta, along with tureens of borsch and goulash, and a decadent tray of syrupy baklava, lay waiting on long tables.
Pleasantly stuffed, Tommy and I slipped out of the feast. I considered a change of clothes, but where we were headed wasn’t likely to be muddy—and it would even be sort of special to walk the Japanese Tea Gardens in our Sunday duds.
I parked near the de Young Museum and we walked down to the gardens. The sun was still out but a breeze had kicked up, making me glad I’d brought along Tommy’s hat. He liked his dark blue knit cap because he’d seen fishermen on the wharf wearing them and he loved stories of seafaring adventure. Just past the entrance, Tommy stopped to admire a bonsai tree on display alongside the tea house.
“Is that a tree?” he asked.
“Sure is, pal. It’s called a bonsai tree.”
“I think it’s better than a real tree,” he said, reaching out to touch it. I started to grab for his arm, but an old Japanese fellow who I took to be the caretaker smiled and said softly, “That okay. He innocent like child. He not hurt it.”
The man was right. Tommy touched the evergreen branch with great tenderness and then ran his finger along the trunk. “It’s so small,” he marveled. “Will it grow up?” The old man explained that it was really a very old tree. His great-grandfather had kept it carefully trimmed, and then his grandfather, and then his father, and now he was the tree’s guardian.
“Like Riley is for me. Like I’m older but people think I’m a kid.” Tommy seemed delighted with the comparison.
“Yes,” the old man said. “You like Moyogi bonsai. Strong, upright person,” he said, straightening his back and thumping his chest, “who shows his own character.” Tommy was obviously delighted. “And you,” he said, nodding slowly to me, “bonsai master. You allow him to stay small inside. Much patience.” He smiled approvingly.
We thanked him and wandered through the paths. The garden’s walls and lush growth blocked the wind. And between the warmth of the sun and a full stomach, Tommy was growing tired. He was dragging his right leg more than usual along the gravel path, so I suggested that we rest on one of the wooden benches beside the koi pond. After a few minutes, Tommy’s eyes closed and his head dropped onto his chest.
I looked out across the garden, the beautifully manicured hedges, the finely sculpted shrubs, the elegantly placed paths, and the thoughtfully chosen monuments. The Japanese gardeners and I both understood that we can improve on nature. They pruned trees and shrubs. I removed rats and cockroaches.
In California, growing stuff is easy. But to be beautiful, plants need a gardener who’s willing to trim branches and pull weeds. Just like cities need exterminators.
— End —
About the Author
Jeffrey Lockwood is a most unusual fellow. He grew up in New Mexico and spent youthful afternoons enchanted by feeding grasshoppers to black widows in his backyard. This might account for both his scientific and literary affinities.
He earned a doctorate in entomology from Louisiana State University and worked for fifteen years as an insect ecologist at the University of Wyoming. He became a world-renowned assassin, developing a method for efficiently killing billions of insects (mostly pests but there’s always the innocent bystander during a hit). This contact with death drew him into questions of justice, violence, and evil.
His career metamorphosed into an appointment in the department of philosophy and the program in creative writing at UW. Unable to escape his childhood, he’s written several award-winning books about the devastation of the West by locust swarms, the use of insects to wage biological warfare, and the terror humans experience when six-legged creatures invade their lives.
Pondering the dark side of humanity led him to the realm of the murder mystery. These days, he explores how the anti-hero of crime noir sheds existentialist light on the human condition: In the end, there are no excuses—we are ultimately responsible for our actions.
Find Jeffrey at:
Website: JeffreyLockwoodAuthor.com
Goodreads, Facebook
Email: Lockwood@uwyo.edu
Stay tuned for the second Riley the Exterminator Mystery, coming in 2017!
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